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page 18
This made him the fourth towering (and fun-loving) presence to have paused in front of this Grotto dedicated to Apollo but chiefly to Venus. This is the kind of adventure that Pound’s writings move us to undertake – adventures mostly among texts, since Pound was a great and erratic transcriber of written records, but happily also among hilltowns and seascapes. None could be more delightful and inspiring than the Portovenere promontory, overlooking, as James wrote, ‘the tideless sea’ – just across the bay from Shelley’s ‘tragic villa’ in Lerici. So, when in 2001 I collected some short pieces on writers and their ambience, I titled the book Grotta Byron. What better image of the ‘apostolic succession’ of which Pound is a major link: Shelley, Byron, James, Pound, Heaney… They were all travellers, readers, contemplatives, lovers of the gifts of the world. These presences have been important during the preparation of this collection, which begins with Pound telling us excitedly of Sirmione, on Catullus’s Lake Garda, and inviting us to follow him in his discoveries. Later the atmosphere darkens considerably, and The Cantos and their drafts record some of the greatest tragedies of the century, and may be said to be complicit with their perpetrators. However, ‘no one is guiltless’, as another poet who knew and appreciated Pound, Eugenio Montale, wrote in his ‘The Hitlerian Spring’. Pound never tires of seeking the golden thread in the pattern, and often, in The Cantos as in these fragments, we come ‘out of heaviness where no mind moves at all’, into ‘light air, under saplings’. Perhaps it is one of the merits of this poetry that it doesn’t understate the difficulties of the journey, doesn’t allow us to ‘get through hell in a hurry’ (canto 46). Most important, since we are dealing with verse, Pound’s words remain in our memory, as just representations of emotions, as inventions added to the trove of the language. In 1956 an Italian scholar and friend of Pound, Carlo Izzo, described him to Eliot as ‘the greatest living creator of language’, with which assessment, Izzo reported to Pound, the prudent Mr Eliot ‘seemed to agree’ (Nuova Corrente 148 (2011), p. 185). In conclusion, I wish to thank Mary de Rachewiltz, who has been a supporter of this project from the beginning, and told me that she would like to see an English edition. After all, it is surprising, as well as indicative, that a book of uncollected and unpublished verse by so major a figure should be available to an Italian audience but not to readers in England and America, the countries with which Pound had xviii Posthumous Cantos
page 19
very much a lover’s quarrel. The quarrel is doubtless the explanation. I am grateful to Carcanet for undertaking this edition, which will go down as another adventure in the complicated publishing history of Ezra Pound (everything concerning him seems to be a little complicated). For making available to me heretofore unpublished material I am thankful to Walter Baumann, Ron Bush and Richard Sieburth. Michael Alexander and Martin Dodsworth were kind enough to read the texts and apparatus, and made helpful suggestions. The Italian edition was dedicated to my parents Giuseppe and Frieda Bacigalupo, who in their roles as doctors and friends were always (I wrote) ‘generous to EP – and to me’. (‘Magnanimity / magnanimity / I know I ask a great deal’, as Pound puts it here.) Early on I contracted a debt with Olga Rudge and Dorothy and Ezra Pound, who put up with my youthful impertinence. In 1962 Pound wrote self-effacingly in my copy of XXX Cantos, the beautiful and accurate Scheiwiller edition translated by his daughter, ‘Hoping Massimo may find some good in it somewhere’. This volume should prove that Pound has not ceased to intrigue and delight over half a century. M.B. Note on the English Edition xix

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This made him the fourth towering (and fun-loving) presence to have paused in front of this Grotto dedicated to Apollo but chiefly to Venus. This is the kind of adventure that Pound’s writings move us to undertake – adventures mostly among texts, since Pound was a great and erratic transcriber of written records, but happily also among hilltowns and seascapes. None could be more delightful and inspiring than the Portovenere promontory, overlooking, as James wrote, ‘the tideless sea’ – just across the bay from Shelley’s ‘tragic villa’ in Lerici. So, when in 2001 I collected some short pieces on writers and their ambience, I titled the book Grotta Byron. What better image of the ‘apostolic succession’ of which Pound is a major link: Shelley, Byron, James, Pound, Heaney… They were all travellers, readers, contemplatives, lovers of the gifts of the world.

These presences have been important during the preparation of this collection, which begins with Pound telling us excitedly of Sirmione, on Catullus’s Lake Garda, and inviting us to follow him in his discoveries. Later the atmosphere darkens considerably, and The Cantos and their drafts record some of the greatest tragedies of the century, and may be said to be complicit with their perpetrators. However, ‘no one is guiltless’, as another poet who knew and appreciated Pound, Eugenio Montale, wrote in his ‘The Hitlerian Spring’. Pound never tires of seeking the golden thread in the pattern, and often, in The Cantos as in these fragments, we come ‘out of heaviness where no mind moves at all’, into ‘light air, under saplings’. Perhaps it is one of the merits of this poetry that it doesn’t understate the difficulties of the journey, doesn’t allow us to ‘get through hell in a hurry’ (canto 46). Most important, since we are dealing with verse, Pound’s words remain in our memory, as just representations of emotions, as inventions added to the trove of the language. In 1956 an Italian scholar and friend of Pound, Carlo Izzo, described him to Eliot as ‘the greatest living creator of language’, with which assessment, Izzo reported to Pound, the prudent Mr Eliot ‘seemed to agree’ (Nuova Corrente 148 (2011), p. 185).

In conclusion, I wish to thank Mary de Rachewiltz, who has been a supporter of this project from the beginning, and told me that she would like to see an English edition. After all, it is surprising, as well as indicative, that a book of uncollected and unpublished verse by so major a figure should be available to an Italian audience but not to readers in England and America, the countries with which Pound had xviii Posthumous Cantos

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